9-Day Egypt Solar Eclipse Tour with Dahabiya Cruise

By this evening you are standing among columns the height of a seven-storey building, and sleeping on a boat. An afternoon flight carries you to Luxor, where your representative meets you at the aircraft steps and takes you to the Nawara. She is a dahabiya — a shallow twin-masted sailing boat with eight cabins, the kind of vessel that travelled this river before engines. Your cabin is yours for the next five nights; you unpack once. 

Then your Egyptologist walks you into Karnak. The ancient Egyptians called it Ipet-isut, the Most Sacred of Places, and twenty generations of pharaohs each added to it over two thousand years. In the Great Hypostyle Hall the columns are set so close that you lose the sky, and late light comes down between them in solid shafts.

Afterwards, Luxor Temple under floodlight — a short, gentle stop rather than a second full site, deliberately timed for after dark when the stone holds the day's warmth and the crowds have gone.

Overnight: Aboard Nawara Luxury Dahabiya Cruise | Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

You cross to the side of the river where the ancient Egyptians buried their kings, and you go early, because by eleven the valley holds heat like an oven.

You pause first at the Colossi of Memnon, two seated giants standing alone in a field, all that survives of a mortuary temple larger than Karnak. Then the Valley of the Kings, where sixty-odd tombs are cut straight down into the rock. Inside, the air is cool and still and the painted ceilings are as sharp as the day they were sealed.

Your last stop is Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahari, rising in three terraces against a sheer cliff a building three and a half thousand years old that looks like it was designed last century.

You are back aboard for lunch, and the afternoon is yours on deck, and tonight you sleep early, because tomorrow starts the reason you came.

Overnight: Aboard Nawara Luxury Dahabiya Cruise | Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

There is no early start today. You eat a long breakfast on deck, and you wait. Around midday, you transfer the short distance to the approved viewing site on the Nile, with shaded seating, cold drinks, ISO-certified solar viewing glasses in your hand, and your Egyptologist beside you. There are other eclipse travellers here, and that is part of it; a few hundred people going completely silent at the same moment is its own memory.

Then it happens. The light thins and goes strange. The temperature falls. In the last seconds before totality, the landscape flickers with shadow bands, and the final bead of sunlight snaps out. For six minutes and twenty-two seconds the corona hangs above the Nile, and the horizon burns orange in all directions. Afterwards you return to the Nawara, and the rest of the day has nothing in it at all. No temple, no drive, no schedule. That is by design: you will want to sit with what you have just seen. Wear light, breathable clothing. Bring a hat. Never look at the partial phases without your glasses. Your guide will tell you the exact seconds when it is safe to take them off, and the exact second to put them back on.

Overnight: Aboard Nawara Luxury Dahabiya Cruise | Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

The sails go up after breakfast, and for the first time you travel the way this river was always travelled.

A dahabiya has no engine noise to speak of. You hear water, rope and wind, and the bank slides past at the speed of a bicycle: sugar cane, water buffalo, children who stop to wave, a heron that lets you get closer than it should. Lunch is served on deck as you go.

By afternoon you reach Edfu and the Temple of Horus, the most completely preserved temple in Egypt, buried under sand for centuries and dug out almost intact. The roof is still on. The pylon still stands forty metres high. You walk through the same processional route the priests used, and your Egyptologist reads you the carvings on the walls, which are essentially the operating instructions for the building.

Overnight: Aboard Nawara Luxury Dahabiya Cruise | Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

This is the unhurried day, and it is in the itinerary on purpose. Herdiab is one of the small green islands the big cruise ships cannot reach; shallow water, palms, sandbanks, and farmland worked much as it was a century ago. You go ashore to walk, or swim from the boat, or stay exactly where you are with a book. Your crew sets up lunch under the trees.

In the afternoon the Nawara lifts anchor and sails on toward Aswan. The river widens here, and the desert comes down to meet it; the rock turns from limestone to granite, and the water runs clear over it. This is the stretch of the Nile that photographs never quite manage. Dinner is aboard, under the sort of sky you only get this far from a city.

An afternoon in a Nubian village. Where the boat's schedule allows, we can arrange tea in a family home on the west bank near Aswan, indigo and ochre houses, and an hour of conversation rather than sightseeing. ON REQUEST, NO CHARGE

Overnight: Aboard Nawara Luxury Dahabiya Cruise | Meals: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

You say goodbye to the crew after breakfast, and Aswan gives you its best three hours before the heat arrives. Two brief stops first: the High Dam, which holds back a lake the size of a small country, and the Unfinished Obelisk — a thousand-tonne shaft still lying in the quarry where it cracked, which tells you more about how these things were made than any finished monument can. 

Then the one that matters. Philae is reached by motorboat, and the temple appears from the water before you land: a whole sanctuary to Isis on its own island, taken apart block by block in the 1970s and rebuilt on higher ground when the dam rose. Morning light comes off the water and onto the columns from below.

The afternoon is deliberately empty: a transfer to Aswan airport, the flight to Cairo, and your representative waiting on the other side. You check into your Cairo hotel with the evening free.

Optional Abu Simbel excursion, at dawn, Ramses II's four sixty-foot colossi at the far southern border, flown or driven before sunrise. It replaces this morning's Aswan sites rather than adding to them — a long, early, extraordinary day. (USD 300 per person)

Overnight: Cairo Luxury Hotel | Meals: Breakfast

You have saved the most famous thing in the world for the day you are most ready for it. You reach the plateau early. The Great Pyramid was the tallest structure on earth for nearly four thousand years, and no photograph prepares you for the size of the individual blocks each one roughly the weight of a car and there are more than two million. You stand at the base, then take in all three pyramids from the panorama point, then come down to the Sphinx and the Valley Temple, where granite blocks fit together without mortar and still hold.

In the afternoon, visit the Grand Egyptian Museum, the largest archaeological museum in the world, with the entire Tutankhamun collection displayed together for the first time since it left the ground. Your Egyptologist takes you through the pieces that matter, then leaves you to wander at your own speed.

Optional:

• Interior of the Great Pyramid approx. USD 30 per person
• Third Pyramid approx. USD 6 per person
• Camel ride at the plateau approx. USD 40 per person

Overnight: Cairo Luxury Hotel | Meals: Breakfast

Breakfast is unhurried, and check-out is late, because there is no reason to rush you out of the country. Your representative meets you in the lobby, your private vehicle takes you to the airport, and you are walked through to your gate rather than left at the kerb. A small hand-made keepsake goes home with you.

You arrived nine days ago knowing Egypt from photographs. You leave having slept five nights on the Nile under sail, walked into tombs cut for kings, stood at the base of the Great Pyramid, and watched the sun go out over the river for six minutes and twenty-two seconds, which is a difficult thing to describe to anyone who was not there. Very few people will have seen what you saw on the second of August. It has been our genuine privilege to host you in Egypt.

If you would rather not leave, a late-afternoon or evening flight can be arranged, with a day room held and a final morning in Islamic Cairo or Khan el-Khalili. Tell us, and we will build it in. ON REQUEST

Meals: Breakfast